Editor’s letter

Citation

Randall, R. (2016), "Editor’s letter", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 44 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/SL-11-2015-0085

Editor’s letter

Article Type: Editorial From: Strategy & Leadership, Volume 44, Issue 1

The six articles in this issue provide how-to advice and insights on innovating business models and the associated software faster and developing the leadership to get the organization in step with doing it effectively:

• Charging customers for the experience

• A new framework that promotes business model innovation

• Influencing performance: why CEOs’ character matters

• Leadership and the wisdom of crowds: profiting from collective intelligence

• Think like a Scrum Master

• Getting customers involved in DevOps

Here’s a brief introduction to the authors and their strategic models:

“Integrating experiences into your business model: five approaches” by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, co-founders of Strategic Horizons LLP and the co-authors of The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage reviews the groundbreaking insights into customer experiences that have been a potent influence in the development of new business models in a wide variety of enterprises. They show how the most innovative companies have successfully designed a charge-for-the-experience or for the transformation business model.

“Designing innovative business models with a framework that promotes experimentation” by Cara Wrigley and Karla Straker, researchers at Queensland University of Technology, Australia, offers a five-model framework that synthesizes knowledge gained from real world case studies into a useful and thought provoking methodology for identifying and developing opportunities for business model innovation. As a starting point, The “Business Model Canvas” of Osterwalder and Pigneur was selected to categorize the efforts of innovators in a diverse set of industries. The business models of forty companies were selected for evaluation and comparison. The researchers’ five archetypal business models were derived from this content analysis.

This masterclass, “Effective leadership today – character not just competence” by Brian Leavy, a professor of strategy at Dublin City University Business School and a Strategy & Leadership contributing editor, offers valuable insights into the new directions that leadership development thinking and practice now need to take, placing particular emphasis on the importance of character, identity and values, not just competence. His article discusses why high character leaders can be shown to deliver significantly better business performance than those at the weaker end of the spectrum.

“Leadership and the wisdom of crowds: how to tap into the collective intelligence of an organization” by Austrian researchers and consultants Kurt Matzler, Andreas Strobl and Franz Bailom proposes four critical steps leaders can take to boost the collective intelligence of their organizations: 1. Create cognitive diversity; 2. Promote independence; 3. Access decentralized knowledge; 4. Effectively aggregate knowledge. If company leadership effectively manages the four key conditions that promote collective intelligence, a crowd of volunteers with a wide range of backgrounds can be smarter than the best expert, introducing fresh ideas and solutions from different fields of knowledge.

“Why a CEO should think like a Scrum Master,” by Alistair Davidson, a Certified Scrum Master, Scrum Product Owner and a Strategy & Leadership contributing editor, and Laura Klemme, a Certified Scrum Master and Scrum coach, suggests that CEOs seeking to enhance the effectiveness of continuous innovation initiatives should imitate the role that a “Scrum Master” has in high speed software development projects. Fundamentally, a Scrum Master is in the business of speeding up the rate of innovation in a project. He or she does so by pursuing four goals: 1. Keeping innovation work cycles or “Sprints” short. 2. Focusing upon value creation and customer involvement throughout the development process. 3. Removing barriers to development that prevent the software programmers from doing their job. 4. Attempting to shelter developers from interventions by external managers.

“How leading companies practice software development and delivery to achieve a competitive edge” by Eric Lesser, the Research Director and North American Leader of the IBM Institute for Business Value and Linda Ban, the institute’s Global C-suite Study Director, reports on how today’s software development features advanced approaches that create more adaptable, end-to-end, continuous delivery – better known as DevOps – capabilities that can quickly align a company’s technology infrastructure with its rapidly changing business needs. Leading software organizations focus on software investments that deliver marketplace results and they track how well they are doing. They achieve this by skillfully practicing Agile and lean software development methods and fostering extensive collaboration among business users, IT professionals and customers throughout the software development and delivery lifecycle.

Good reading!

Robert M. Randall

Editor